THE STARLING 169 



JACKDAW. Like the rook, this bird sometimes acquires a taste 

 for fruit, probably from scarcity of its usual animal food, but, 

 though occasionally devouring cherries, does but little injury to 

 fruit. The jackdaw's depredations are mostly confined to the game 

 and poultry-rearing grounds, it devouring eggs of pheasants and 

 partridges and away laying hens ; also very prone to pilfer young 

 birds. A sharp look-out must be kept for this bird by game and 

 poultry rearers, attracting by a little extra food as bait and there 

 setting traps, or better, shooting the depredators. The number of 

 jackdaws are so few as compared with rooks that neither foresters 

 nor graziers need lament deprivation of their services in destroying 

 pests. 



STARLING. Excellent services are rendered by this bird in woods, 

 only when they make roosting places of young plantations they, by 

 their excrementations, ruin the trees, especially belts of coni- 

 fers. The same remark applies to rooks in their breeding and also 

 roosting places as regards the under-cover, nothing being so un- 

 sightly as the bespattering of the leafage and so detrimental to 

 underwood growth, besides surcharging the atmosphere with un- 

 healthy ammonia emanations. Grass, and even arable land farmers, 

 park and pleasure ground proprietors, derive great benefit from 

 the starlings feeding on wireworms, leather-jackets, woodlice, 

 millipedes, ground insects and their larvae, while urban and sub- 

 urban dwellers owe much to the verdure of their lawns and rela- 

 tive freeness of their gardens from ground pests to the starlings 

 they will not allow to make nesting-places in roofs ; yet so convinced 

 are urban and suburban dwellers of the good influence of these 

 birds that some provide nesting-boxes, pigeon-cote fashion, on poles, 

 or affixed to a tree so as to resemble a broken-off branch and hole. 



To the cherry-grower no worse pest exists. Only the gun can keep 

 the crop from destruction by starlings, and that means expert 

 shots and four of such to the acre. Count the cost of this preven 

 tion and see what profit is left to the grower, when possibly the 

 vision may clear so that reason may appear on the side of preventing 

 undue increase. That starlings have greatly increased is the ver- 

 dict of fruit-growers on all sides, and this increase led to the acquir- 

 ing of new tastes, onslaught being made on raspberries in fields, 

 on damsons and even apples and pears in orchards. To augment 

 the British-reared starlings not a few come from abroad, which 

 may possibly be turned to advantage, for the birds are said to be 

 delicious eating when baked in a pie with some bacon under and 

 over the plucked and drawn, peppered and salted birds. 



In towns, starlings may be caught in severe weather and ground 

 covered with snow by making a clear space a foot wide and running 

 a cord along it attached to pegs, strewing in the track broken-up 

 bread crust, bits of meat, or other scraps. When the starlings, 

 joined by sparrows galore, take the bait freely, remove the cord and 



